Aisle 5

Ok, so for those of you who are frequently like “dude, why’s today’s episode called ______”, here’s an explanation for today’s:

The non-comprehensive list of things that happened to me over the weekend includes an incident at the thrift store. As I turned to walk down the “Men’s long-sleeve t-shirts” aisle, I smelled something really weird and foul. I looked down, and sufferin’ spectacles, there was feces on the floor and, holy hamsters, it’s probably of human origin, and oh my Froot Loops, I’ve got to get out of here.

That was crazy, and even crazier was that nobody else seemed to notice. It was like some Twilight Zone plot where there’s this town where everyone is just kind of used to the idea that there’s (probably human) feces on the floor, and I’m the transient motorist who’s looking to maybe pick up a long-sleeve t-shirt for whatever reason — like, I guess I’m headed for a long-sleeve t-shirt convention or something — and I’m nonplussed when no one seems to notice when I make this big “Eeeuuuggg!” sound and jump away from this one spot on the floor really fast. Like, you know, I’m the weird one due to my ethnocentric notions of where it’s acceptable to defecate, and therefore I’m a close-minded jerk. That’s the moral of this episode of The Twilight Zone, I guess.

Except this was totally in the real world; the normal world; World Prime; the world compared to which all sci-fi worlds seem a little odd; the world in which, when I point to the floor and declare, “That’s feces!”, you’d expect the other shoppers to take notice and react with outraged disgust.

And so yeah, that was one of the things I experienced this weekend, so I named this Mountain Time episode after it, and now that I think about it, that’s kind of like saying this episode is shit. But I think we should think of it as something weird and memorable. Kind of like friendship or dissecting an animal.